CRM Success Tips Blog

In law firms, time is money, literally, and everyone is incredibly busy leaving them with little or no time to regularly update or fully utilize the CRM system. Lawyers\' highly expensive time isn’t best spent entering or updating contact data. Their time is best spent doing legal work, spending time with clients, developing business and growing relationships. As legal marketing professionals, we must recognize this and come up with different ways to utilize CRM systems to accommodate attorneys\' busy schedules. For more than 15 years, we have served some of the nation\'s top firms helping them increase attorney and stakeholder satisfaction while achieving CRM success. Here are four easy ways you can

I\'m sure we\'ve all heard the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And you’re probably wondering what does this have to do with my CRM system. Well, similar to eating apples, it is the little things you do every day that contribute to good health and more importantly CRM success. For example, taking half an hour to train new users at their desks, working with an assistant on formatting a letter, attending a group meeting to better understand how CRM could help attorneys achieve their business development goals, communicating small wins to the entire firm. These little things really do add up.  Here are some little things you can

How you categorize contacts in your CRM can play a big role in the success of email campaigns and general business development efforts. If you are hosting a private event in Scottsdale, Arizona or Atlanta, Georgia for a client or prospect, you don\'t want to send an invitation to competitors in the same area and have them crash the event.  Categories are frequently used to break your CRM database into more manageable groups or classifications so targeting and segmenting can become much easier. But there are many reasons - and a variety of ways - to categorize your CRM contacts. Some of the obvious ones are to categorize contacts as “clients”, “top

Getting professionals to input or manage contacts in the CRM has always been a major goal and challenge for businesses. Firms have long struggled to convince users to consistently enter and maintain contact data. We think it is time to reset those unrealistic expectations and redefine the concept of CRM adoption and success. As CRM Success consultants, we ask every client with whom we work, “What does CRM success look like for you?” Asking this important question allows us to uncover stakeholders\' definition of success, uncover pain points and see where they are currently versus where they would like to be. Some answers we commonly receive are: fewer manual processes less reliance

We hear a lot of buzz about big data, but what we really need isn’t more data – it’s better data. Research shows that up to 30% of our key CRM and other data degrades each year as people get hired, fired, promoted and change jobs, move and change addresses, get married and divorced, retire and even die.  At the same time businesses are opening and closing, merging and being acquired, moving and relocating. Without our constant attention, all this can add up to a huge pile of data that is missing or mistaken, duplicative or dated, incorrect or incomplete. These data issues can be particularly problematic in professional services where, probably more than

Are you considering a new CRM? Before you decide to purchase a new system, a better and more budget friendly option may be to update and improve your current system and more effectively utilize what you have. Many relationships go sour and end. This may be due to reasons of all kinds but before couples call it quits, they generally try to identify the issues causing turmoil and work to fix them. Finding the root of these kinds of problems can help couples reignite their relationships. The same thing can happen with the relationship between professionals and their CRM systems. At CLIENTSFirst Consulting, we have acted as a defacto relationship counselor for

To improve CRM adoption and contact data sharing, regular reporting is a must. The right reports can provide the key information and value that CRM users expect and also drive their interest and buy-in. For many professional services firms, finding ways to demonstrate CRM value and encourage adoption is a constant struggle. CRM system usage is rarely mandated, which means the marketing team is often put in the difficult position of trying to convince individual professionals that there really is value in entering information into the CRM system themselves or getting their assistants or marketing colleagues to help with the input. Too often this means that marketing and CRM teams are constantly acting in

If your CRM performance hasn\'t been living up to your expectations due to a lack of communication, training or data quality, you aren\'t alone. Respected research organizations have been saying for years that more than 70% of CRM implementations fail to meet expectations. But these CRM Success failures are often caused by people and process issues rather than technology issues. While every organization strives to make its CRM deployment as smooth and painless as possible, many get off to an unsteady start. From working with law firms and professional service firms of all sizes for more than a decade on CRM implementations we\'ve learned that they must have these three key supports

Welcome to our annual roundup of CLIENTSFirst Consulting’s top-performing posts of the year! The world of marketing technology is constantly evolving, with new trends, innovations and best practices emerging all the time. We strive to stay on top of the latest developments and provide our readers with valuable insights and actionable advice. In this post, we\'ll look at our most popular blog posts and videos from the past year. Our top posts showed that more firms than ever are: switching CRM systems, focusing on digital-first marketing strategies, increasing their use of ERM systems, and relying on outsourcing various marketing technology positions. Given these trends, it is no surprise (to us) that some

Chris Fritsch and Stefanie Marrone recently hosted a master class on tips and trends in marketing technology. They shared best practices for choosing the right email marketing tool, how to redefine CRM adoption, the rise of artificial intelligence in content marketing and various ways you can let your lawyers be lawyers rather than having them get bogged down by technology. Here’s a recap of some of the topics covered. 1. Digital First Given the shifts in law firm marketing due to social distancing, we can continue to see firms and organizations implement a digital-first strategy. Most firms are not fully in-person anymore, so firms are balancing in-person business development and marketing strategies